The "LNP Living: Paper Trail - Part II" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Searching my boxes of old family photographs to see if I could find any photos of the first home that Carol and I shared shortly after we were married in 1967.  

Tattered article on my Uncle Clair.

Found a few that I will share with you sometime in a future story, but I also found an old sepia and battered newspaper article that partially read:  "Crash Injuries" with a a photograph of my Uncle Clair Woods who died in an automobile accident when he was 16 years old in 1941.  I never had the chance meet him, but the stories that were told about Uncle Clair made me wish I had more information about his life.  Well, that is now possible!  Yesterday I told you that the LNP, the Lancaster Newspaper,  has digitized every newspaper they have ever printed since June 17, 1796.  All you need is the name of the newspaper and a specific date to research just about anything you may want to research.  Well, the taped and battered newspaper article I found about my uncle had a date of December 3, 1931 on the top of the article.  Bingo!  That's all that was needed to find the story about the accident and information about his life.  The article I had was taped and hard to read and part of it was torn and missing.  I opened Lancasteronline.com, followed the directions to the "Archives" and within a few minutes had found the article that was on page 3 of the Lancaster New Era on  Thursday, December 3, 1931.  There was a long headline that ended in "Crash Injuries", but the headline wasn't as important to me as was the article and photograph of my Uncle Clair.  I knew he died when he flew out of the car's rumble seat during an accident, but never knew much more than that.  My dad or two Aunts never wanted to talk about their brother, and I never pushed for information, so reading the story gave me information I never knew.  I printed out the entire article and was able to enlarge just the article to fill the full 8 1/2" X 11" piece of paper.  The following is the article telling about the accident and listing information about Uncle Clair that I never knew until I read it online.  Thank you LNP for giving me a chance to finally fill in family information that I never knew.  I will continue to fill in more blanks in the next few days while using the newspaper's website.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.

Entire article telling how my Uncle Clair died in 1931.
Click on image to enalarge.